Story for the Week
I finished two books in one week. I was not on vacation, and I work a full-time job. So…sleep is over-rated. 😴
Goodreads will tell you each book took four days to finish. That’s really only because I started each just before I went to bed on the first day and finished them in the morning of the fourth day. They were two-day 🌞 (aka night 🌜) reads. In other words, I was really tired all week.
Not all of the reviews I post are 5-star reads, obviously. I know a lot of reviewers who won’t post anything less than a 3-star review. If they didn’t enjoy a book, they don’t review it at all. But when I set out to publish this blog, I committed to talking about books I love and books I don’t love. Just because I didn’t enjoy something doesn’t mean someone else won’t, and vice versa. If someone knows their book tastes are similar to mine, they may skip something I rate 2 or 3 stars. But they might also read my review, decide that they don’t care about the things that bothered me, and pick it up anyway.
On the flip side, I also know people who have given reviews of 1 or 2 stars with a comment that they didn’t finish the book. They say life is too short to spend it reading a book you’re not enjoying. I say that it’s not fair to anyone (author or reader) to review a book you didn’t finish.
I’ve talked about this a bit before (Do I Know How to Pick ’Em or What?), ironically on a 5-star review for the same author reviewed here. Some books start with a slow burn and end with a great twist. Some never get there. But you risk missing the great ending if you give up, and if that would have changed your opinion, then you’ve just cheated yourself out of a great ending and you’ve cheated your followers out of a fair review.
The example I use is you have a teacher grading a test with 100 questions. The student gets eight of the first ten questions wrong, so the teacher fails the student without grading the rest of the test. Maybe the student just couldn’t focus at the beginning of the test. Maybe that was the most difficult material. But the teacher decided that it started out bad, so it was going to end just as bad. Hardly fair.
If I’m going to review a book, I’m going to finish it. And honestly, the only books I don’t finish are books that I can tell aren’t for me once I start reading them. I joined NetGalley in 2018, a site where reviewers can request advance reader copies (ARCs) in exchange for honest reviews. You commit to reviewing 80% of the titles you receive. Of the 157 titles I’ve received, I’ve only declined to finish and review 10 of them.
When I read I book, I start with the assumption that I’m going to love it. I want to love them all. Why would I read them otherwise? I go up and down in my rating scale the whole time I’m reading, and I make notes of what I like and don’t like so I can offer that up as well. The long, drawn-out descriptions and overuse of adverbs that don’t appeal to me might be right up someone else’s alley and not deter them from reading the book at all.
I’m not saying all of this to pat myself on the back. It’s just confirmation for all of you who read this blog that I am giving you my best effort. I’m not giving up on a title just because it gets a little slow in the middle. I’d rather tell you it was a little slow in the middle but that the ending made up for it. And if it didn’t…I’ll tell you that too. 😉
Everyone has different tastes when it comes to books. We all know that. If your tastes run similar to mine (and you value your sleep), do yourself a favor and start this one on a weekend because you won’t want to put it down.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
5 Stars for Gone Tonight by Sarah Pekkanen
352 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: August 1, 2023
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher’s Description
Catherine Sterling thinks she knows her mother. Ruth Sterling is quiet, hardworking, and lives for her daughter. All her life, it’s been just the two of them against the world. But now, Catherine is ready to spread her wings, move from home, and begin a new career. And Ruth Sterling will do anything to prevent that from happening.
Ruth Sterling thinks she knows her daughter. Catherine would never rebel, would never question anything about her mother’s past or background. But when Ruth’s desperate quest to keep her daughter by her side begins to reveal cracks in Ruth’s carefully-constructed world, both mother and daughter begin a dance of deception.
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Main Characters:
- Catherine Sterling – 24 years old, recently graduated from nursing school, works in the Memory Wing of Sunrise Senior Living, and plans to start a job at Johns Hopkins
- Ruth Sterling – 42 years old, estranged from her family when she became pregnant as a teenager, Catherine’s mother, works as a waiter in a diner, beginning to show signs of early onset Alzheimer’s
I discovered Sarah Pekkanen when I read The Wife Between Us, which she co-authored with Greer Hendricks. She (they) will always be on my must-read list, and Gone Tonight is just another example of why.
Split into three acts, Gone Tonight tells the stories of Catherine and her mother Ruth. Shunned by her family when she became pregnant in high school, Ruth never looked back and focused solely on providing for and protecting Catherine. So all of Catherine’s life, it has been just Ruth and Catherine. Ruth is determined to start writing down her past so that Catherine will know how they came to be on their own.
Having recently completed nursing school, Catherine accepted a job at Johns Hopkins and plans to move to Baltimore until she realizes that her mother has been showing signs of memory problems. But as she starts looking into why Ruth kept her memory issues a secret, Catherine discovers there are a lot of things that Ruth has been keeping secret.
Oh the secrets…and they just keep on coming. Pekkanen does a great job of giving us those “I did not see that coming” moments.
Chapters alternate between Catherine and Ruth, so we as readers understand their motivations way before they understand one another. And if they would just really talk to one another…if Ruth would just tell Catherine the truth…. But real life doesn’t work like that. People don’t always have the conversations they should, especially if they feel like they’re trying to protect the other person.
I will not say anymore because I don’t want to spoil this one. Order this one now. You won’t be sorry you did.
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